-
The Ebony magazine that got me a few minutes with Nichelle Nichols
I was talking Star Trek autographs recently with my friend Robert J. Sawyer. Rob is a lifelong original-series fan and has an extensive Star Trek collection, but he’s never collected autographs. He is an accomplished novelist and he follows the standard practice of his profession: you sign autographs freely for people who value your work, although he understands why many celebrities do charge.
I didn’t collect autographs early on. Paying someone for a signature seemed a waste of my meagre funds. But I watched the fans at one of the first conventions I attended and realized those dollars weren’t really buying the signature. Instead, the money bought a brief meeting with someone who was there, on the set during those few years in the ’60s. The autograph you take home is a reminder of that meeting.
That conversation with Rob got me thinking about my Ebony magazine from January of 1967, because of the pleasant chat I had with Nichelle Nichols as she signed it.
Ebony debuted in 1945, and it was an important expression of the black experience in America. That meant Nichols was thrilled to be the cover story in 1967 but, for today’s readers, the word choices and focus are outdated. For example:
The voice belongs to pretty Los Angeles actress Nichelle Nichols — or, as she is known aboard the Enterprise on the new Thursday night NBC-TV color series Star Trek, Lieutenant Uhura and, according to present-day Earth records, the first Negro astronaut, a triumph of modern-day TV over modern-day NASA.
It also tells us: “The communication officer she portrays was, in the pilot film, played by a man. Anticipating the future, however, planners decided to give the role to a woman, and a Negro at that.” And the article focuses far more on her beauty than her career or experience on the show. One photo caption reads: “In good shape for the part, the actress meets the dimensions both in talent and eye appeal.”
There is also this sentiment attributed to production executive Herb Solow: Nichols was a bonus for Star Trek as “we had hoped to (just) find a shapely broad.”
That language was, presumably, acceptable in the ’60s, and yet it actually underscores how important this role was for representation of women and black people. Uhura was an intelligent, capable professional. An oft-heard Whoopi Goldberg anecdote is testimony to this. On StarTrek.com, the multi-award-winning entertainer said:
When I was nine years old, Star Trek came on. I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.
That is a remarkable statement about the power of entertainment to inspire people and change society. It is also a sad reminder that only recently has that same validation begun to arrive on-screen for transgender and other marginalized peoples.
My few minutes with Nichelle
Nichelle Nichols ran a fund-raiser for the people of Japan in early 2011, following the earthquake and tsunami. She mailed out signed 8x10s in exchange for a donation of $50 or more to any legitimate related charity. That photo is currently hanging on my wall.
When I learned she would be at Fan Expo in Toronto that same summer, I debated getting her autograph again. I had her signature on other 8x10s, the cast photo from The Score Board, a restaurant menu purchased from TNG script coordinator Eric Stillwell (I’ll write about that one day) and a few other items.
But then I remembered her telling the crowd at a previous convention how important that Ebony magazine appearance had been. So I found a copy.
“Oh, Nichelle is going to love this,” her assistant said when I reached the front of the line at Fan Expo. And she did. Already smiling as she finished with the fan ahead of me, she beamed when she saw the Ebony.
My copy was in much better condition than the one she had, she said. So, of course, I immediately tried to give her mine. “I couldn’t take it,” she said, and I flashed on Uhura’s reply to Cyrano Jones’ offer of a free tribble: “Oh, I couldn’t…could I?”
But no, she refused, even though my offer was sincere. She signed the cover and told me that, even though her show business career started at 16, she had hardly any on-screen credits when the Ebony crew visited the set. That made the article and the photo shoot an overwhelming experience. She took a last look at herself on the cover and handed the magazine to me.
That autograph cost me $60 plus whatever I paid for the magazine, but it got me a few minutes with Nichelle Nichols. For me, just one of the thousands of fans who gather to see her every year, that was money well spent.
Postscript
I have asked only one non-Trek person for an autograph: Robert J. Sawyer. I have his signature on two novels — Hominids and Calculating God — and on Boarding the Enterprise, a collection of Star Trek essays. I wrote about that book here.
-
I am unqualified for the 1988 Toronto Trek official trivia quiz
The Toronto Trek Celebration 2 convention was held in 1988. It was “a place where people could go to see and do all sorts of fascinating things.” (ID that for bonus points.) One of those things was the Official Star Trek Trivia Quiz.
To qualify, attendees had to answer 10 preliminary questions. The first 15 people to score a perfect 10 would be invited to compete in the big quiz.
I only got nine right. See how you do.
I list the answers below.
The quiz was sponsored by the Handy Book Exchange, a Toronto institution that opened its Avenue Road location in 1982 and closed its doors in 2018, following the sad footsteps of many bookstores.
Photo from blogTO Here are the instructions for the qualifier quiz.
I miss Toronto Trek
Toronto Trek, originally called Toronto Trek Celebration, was important to my early fandom, and I miss those gatherings. The atmosphere at a Toronto Trek was extremely friendly and collegial. The big commercial cons, like Toronto’s Fan Expo, are excellent and, yes, friendly and collegial in their way, but they really focus on parting people from their money. There were lots of opportunities to spend money at a Toronto Trek, but that’s not why you were there. You were there to meet people who love what you love. They were special gatherings.
I plan to write a number of articles detailing the history of Toronto Trek.
And now, the answers
Number 3. From TrekCore 1. Vulcan term for blood fever: plak tow, Amok Time
2. Kirk’s nephew: Peter Kirk, Operation — Annihilate!
3. The actress who played Leila Kalomi in This Side of Paradise: Jill Ireland
4. The instrument used by Zor Khan: the atavachron, All Our Yesterdays
5. The two combatants from Cheron: Lokai and Bele, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
6. Gem’s planet: Minara II, The Empath
7. Balok’s ship: The Fesarius, The Corbomite Maneuver
8. Weapon Spock uses to “kill” Kirk in Amok Time: the ahn-woon
9. Who said “I am putting the bag on Krako” and in which episode: Kirk, A Piece Of The Action, and the quote is actually “I’m going to put the bag on Krako.”
10. Spell the name of the grain on K-7: quadrotriticale, The Trouble With Tribbles
The one I flunked: Gem’s planet. I could not remember the system named in the episode so, fair enough, I missed that one. But it’s an odd question, because I don’t think Gem was actually from Minara. The Enterprise travels to Minara II to evacuate the Federation research scientists posted there before the star goes nova, but it is presented as otherwise uninhabited.
I think Gem is from somewhere else. The episode takes place on Minara II because the scientists were convenient subjects for the Vians’ research.
I would not have qualified for that trivia contest. Gem would have tripped me up.
-
The Concordance Color Book — and three fantastic surprise autographs
This was going to be an article about the Star Trek Concordance, both the initial fan version and the later publisher editions, with a bit at the end about the Star Trek Concordance Color Book 1, a small fanzine-type collection of drawings.
But that plan changed when I started flipping through the Color Book — and I found a David Gerrold autograph I didn’t know was there.
My first Star Trek autograph was Gerrold’s, on a first-edition copy of his The World of Star Trek. This foundation stone of my collection was purchased at Toronto’s Bakka sci-fi bookstore. I also have Gerrold’s autograph on a Trouble with Tribbles script (ordered online from him), a Vul-Con II convention program from 1975, and a seri-cel from the animated episode More Tribbles, More Troubles. (What is a seri-cel?)
I was thrilled to have another Gerrold autograph, especially as it was a surprise. And then I kept flipping through the book. And then this happened…
So, this was a moment to remember.
I also had a D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry autograph. That I did not know about before. Wow.
All three autographs were personalized to Gennie Summers. She likely got her book signed at a convention. Roddenberry wrote “Hello Gennie, Sorry to missed you.” (He presumably intended to write “Sorry I missed you.”) I imagine she handed the book to a friend and then went off somewhere, just before Roddenberry came along.
It is impossible to definitively identify the convention. Equicon ’74 is a good candidate; Roddenberry, Fontana and Gerrold were all there (and there’s even some film from that con), although with most of the main cast in attendance and considering celebrities didn’t charge for signatures in the early days, it seems strange there aren’t more here.
Perhaps, as an amateur artist, Summers gravitated towards the writers in the lineup.
Ethel Gennie Summers
I was able to find information about Summers, as the unusual spelling of her name made for effective searches in online newspaper archives.
Summer loved art but, according to her hometown paper, the Springfield Leader and Press, she was “prevented from seriously pursuing art as a career by eye trouble a number of years ago.”
The February 12, 1967 article Cassville’s Miss Gennie Creates ‘Crazy Critters’ continues:
Miss Summers fashions all kinds of animals and birds — both real and fancied — from native nuts, gourds, pine cones, teasels, gourds, cockleburs, peach pits, acorns, sycamore balls and all kinds of seeds. Some of the results are so realistic they are described as “cute”; others so “far out” that they are fascinating.
(A teasel is a tall prickly plant with spiny purple flower heads, a cocklebur is a flowering plant in the sunflower family, and the journalist listed gourds twice — that’s not my error.)
Summers went on to create artwork for a number of fanzines, according to the site Fanlore. It reports that she won several FanQ Awards and lists more than 30 publications to which she contributed.
The fan story From Hell’s Heart used her illustration on the cover. The story is a sequel to The Wrath of Khan, according to Fanlore:
Khan’s spirit returns to haunt the Admiral, not having succeeded from getting his revenge.
“Khan’s obsession is the key that unlocks the door to Admiral Kirk… Khan vows to have Kirk chained at his feet, to serve him in HELL!”
Summers died in 2010, according to an obituary in The Cassvile Democrat.
ETHEL GENNIE SUMMERS
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Ethel Gennie Summers, 85, of Cassville, passed away Tuesday, May 25, 2010, in Red Rose Health and Rehabilitation Center, Cassville.
She was born, Aug. 2, 1924, in Nebraska, the daughter of Alvin Dale and Ethel Mae (Smith) Summers, who preceded her in death.
She lived much of her life in Barry County. She was a self-employed dog groomer, but was more known by her close friends as a graphic artist for Star Trek. She designed the posters for the movie and also drew characters for Star Trek comic books. She even had a space ship in her home, which she invited some to get in.
Cassville, Missouri
The claim that Summers designed “the posters for the movie and also drew characters for Star Trek comic books” must be a reference to fan productions, and I could find no information on the spaceship that was in her home.
D.C. Fontana had that drawing on her wall
Not a coloring book, for some reason, but a “color book,” the publication was produced in 1973 by John Trimble, husband of Bjo Trimble, the people most identified with the campaign that got Star Trek a third season. It’s a small book, folded once and held together by one staple. It reprints artwork that appeared in The Star Trek Concordance, a fan-produced show encyclopedia. Its original iteration covered only seasons one and two, and I will write an article about it and the publisher editions that followed.
The centre spread — the one Roddenberry and Fontana signed for Summers — was drawn by Alicia Austin. The biography in the book says Austin is a cytotechnician who “illustrated many fanzines, as well as books, and the new science fiction magazine, Vertex.” She has 22 pieces of art in the book and lives in LA today. Visit her site to see more of her work.
Austin’s large drawing depicts a “young Vulcan” sitting atop his pet sehlat.
Her work was the go-to reference piece for none other than D.C. Fontana, who wrote both Journey to Babel, the original-series episode that first references Spock’s sehlat, and Yesteryear, the animated series episode in which we see young Spock with his pet, named I Chaya. In a July 2016 episode of the Saturday Morning Trek podcast, Fontana told host Aaron Harvey:
I wanted it to be kind of bear-like, so that it had a lovable quality about it. And I wanted it to be faithful, because the sehlat wanted to follow Spock, and did, and of course it saved his life. I made up that reference in Journey to Babel on the original series, as “Oh, it’s a teddy bear?” says DeForest Kelley, and then I think it’s Spock who says “On Vulcan, the teddy bears have six-inch fangs.” I have a picture on my wall by Alicia Austin of a sehlat, and when people say to me “What does a sehlat look like?” I show them Alicia’s picture.
Four other artists contributed to the Color Book. Notable among them were:
Greg Bear: now better known as a novelist, with more than 50 books published, including the 1984 Star Trek novel Corona, Bear contributed three drawings.
Greg Jein: Jein went on to work on many Star Trek productions. He created the V’ger interior models for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, worked on two Enterprise-D studio models, contributed to TNG’s Encounter at Farpoint and other episodes, and worked on DS9, Voyager and many of the movies. The cover of Inside Star Trek issue 2 is his sketch of the Klingon battle cruiser; see my article on that here.
So, how did I end up with the book?
I bought the book out of a bargain bin at a Toronto Trek convention. I don’t remember exactly when because I didn’t take special note of it. It was sold in a plastic comic bag and I never took it out, so I did not know the autographs were inside. Clearly, the dealer didn’t either.
I paid $10 for it.
I bought it because it’s a quirky piece of Star Trek memorabilia from the 1970s, and I am a big fan of quirky Star Trek memorabilia from the 1970s. But at the time I wondered if it was worth $10.
A few months ago, I recommended that collectors go through their boxes of stuff after I was surprised to find some View-Master reels. That was fun, but it can’t touch the thrill of turning a page and finding a Gene Roddenberry I didn’t know I had. So, go through your stuff. Open boxes. Turn some pages. Seriously. You might find something wonderful.
And thank you, Gennie. I don’t know how your book got to that bargain box in Toronto, but I am glad it did and glad too to learn a little about your life.
Bjo Trimble, D.C. Fontana, David Gerrold, Equicon, Gene Roddenberry, Gennie Summers, Greg Bear, Greg Jein, I Chaya, John Trimble, Journey to Babel, More Tribbles, Sehlat, Star Trek, Star Trek Concordance, Star Trek Concordance Color Book, The Trouble with Tribbles, Toronto Trek, View-Master, Yesteryear -
Inside Star Trek issue 4: Klingon side-projects with Matt Jefferies and coloured food cubes with Irving Feinberg
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 4, published October 1968.
The best issue so far, Inside Star Trek 4 gave readers inside information on two TOS production stars: art director Matt Jefferies and property master Irving Feinberg.
Dorothy Fontana interviewed Matt Jefferies, designer of the Enterprise, the shuttlecraft, the Klingon battle cruiser and most of what we saw on TOS.
Roddenberry and Jefferies, from the book Beyond the Clouds Walter Matt Jefferies started his Hollywood career with design work on military-themed productions. He told Fontana “I did ship interiors at MGM for The Wreck of the Mary Deare, World War II airplane stuff for Never So Few and The Bull Halsey Story” and then casually mentioned that he also worked on the original Ocean’s Eleven.
For most of his career to that point, he was a set designer, but on Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and April Savage, his title was art director. Fontana asked what an art director does:
I’m responsible for everything they photograph, except the people. It entails the initial design of sets, supervising the building, colors, painting, everything that’s on the stage or location, having it ready for the camera and within budget. It calls for working with the director, set decorator, carpenters, painters, special effects, the whole ball of wax.
Fontana asked him about creating planet sets, and how that differs from designing interiors.
The first thing I do is work out what has to happen in a proposed set… How many actors we have, what the moves are, what kind of general settings the script calls for, how to light it, how to get the equipment in and out, what the camera shots will be, the scope of the shots…you design the set around that.
The approach to interiors is the same as exteriors… In the early stages, John Dwyer, set decorator, comes in and looks at the initial drawings. Then he and I sit down and have a talk about what I have in mind. He proceeds to put his talents to work finding the proper dressing along the lines of what we’ve discussed. I depend on this man very heavily, not only to carry out my ideas but to come up with an endless fountain of his own ideas. And he does. For the most part, stage 9 [which houses almost all of the standing sets for the Enterprise] is a very static set, and John can turn that over to his assistant, Mike May. Then John has the opportunity of getting off the lot and searching for unusual things — something particular he has in mind, or some idea of mine. But John has the opportunity to get out and look where I don’t. So he’s my floating eyes and sticky fingers…that’s where all the ‘freebies’ come in too. He has a wonderful knack for finding these things.
See my coverage of issue 1 for Fontana’s interview with John Dwyer.
Fontana then asked about the Klingon battle cruiser and the Botany Bay, from Space Seed.
We had already established the essential character of the Klingons, so we really had more to draw on in the background than we originally had on the Enterprise. The Klingon character was different and clearly defined in several scripts. We tried to keep some of that character in the design of the ship — cold and, in a sense, vicious. We tried to get into it some of the qualities of a manta ray, shark, or bird of prey, because the Klingons follow that general feeling. Another requirement is that we had to get a feeling their ships were on par with the starships in equipment, power, size, etc. After many sketches and many evenings, it finally evolved. Everyone liked it, and that’s what we built. It was strictly an extra-curricular activity on my part.
The Botany Bay was actually designed before the Enterprise. It was a little idea that popped up and was labelled “antique space freighter.’ Later on, we made it look like something else — a vehicle out of the early 2000s.
The Jefferies drawings here are all from the wonderful people at TrekCore.
Creating limbo
The design of the frontier town in Spectre of the Gun, in which only the fronts and basic interiors of the buildings were represented, has often been characterized as a cost-saving idea, but this never made a lot of sense as the studio backlot surely had standing western sets the production could have used. Fontana credited this “limbo” design to Jefferies, and he characterized it as a thematic, rather than a budget, decision: “It wasn’t a true limbo — it was a stylized limbo only in what wasn’t there. When you say ‘stylized limbo’ you usually mean misbalanced proportions, things hanging in space, etc. What was there was real. It looked different and it worked effectively.”
Jefferies said that the most challenging sets to that point had been for What Are Little Girls Made Of? and Amok Time, while the most successful were for A Taste of Armageddon, The Return of the Archons, and The Squire of Gothos. His favorite set at the time was “the temple and oracle room in a show we’re shooting (now), For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”
Asked about the most difficult aspect of the job, “Matt had a ready answer for that one: Compromise.”
Usually what we wind up with is only a small part of what I would like to see. But you have to give with the material you have available, the capabilities of the people working for you, time, money — bend for the lighting man, bend of the cameraman, for the director. The most difficult thing is to come up with something you visualized that is on budget and will work best for the company. Frequently, when we get up there to shoot, there’s not a lot left of the original concept.”
Jefferies’ elaborate shuttle design 
What he had to settle for 
Jefferies’ decompression chamber 
The chamber in Space Seed Feinberg’s tribble-ations
Irving Feinberg proved that Deep Space Nine did not invent the name of its tribbles tribute episode; the article he wrote in this issue was called Trials and Tribble-ations of a Master of Properties.
Feinberg defined his job as managing properties, “any object in the show that works, i.e. is handled, used, or moved by an actor. It may be as big as a boulder or as small as a pin. For each episode I must first read the script for the story content, and then break it down, checking it for all of the props that are to be used. These props must be available by the first day of shooting.
He goes on to describe his tribble travails:
I had about 1,000 tribbles made in four different sizes and four different colors. Some of them were fitted with balloons which could be inflated to make the tribbles pulsate. Others contained motors which moved them about. In one sequence, when I had just finished piling hundreds of tribbles around the set and attaching numerous others to the walls, William Shatner came up to me and with a perfectly straight face told me that they would all have to be removed so that the walls could be repainted. Just before I started to climb those same walls, the whole cast and crew exploded in one grand guffaw.
Food cubes of the future
Feinberg also provided a short-hand Enterprise cookbook:
While on these distant planets, our actors are served with exotic food and drink. I use cubed apples, celery, or other fruits and vegetables dyed bright blue, green, or purple with harmless vegetable dye. I use the vegetable dye because they must not only look strange, but they must be edible. In one scene I had to have a blue drink. I thought I had found the answer to both the color and palatability when I discovered blue curacao. The director swore that I was making William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy tipsy with my liqueur, so, much to their disgust, I had to go back to my trusty (but not tasty) blue dye in water.
Feinberg’s props, like Uhura’s earpiece, were called feinbergers on set It’s gratifying to read that Feinberg really liked his job: “I take pride in my work and in Star Trek. I want each episode to be artistically and scientifically logical. Being the property master on Star Trek may challenge my ingenuity and send me home talking to myself, but I am pleased to be associated with all of the artists on it and proud of the finished product.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
A Taste of Armageddon, Botany Bay, DC Fontana, For The World is Holow and I Have Touched the Sky, Inside Star Trek, Inside Star Trek newsletter, Irving Feinberg, John Dwyer, Klingon, Matt Jefferies, Spectre of the Gun, Star Trek, The Return of the Archons, The Squire of Gothos, What Are Little Girls Made Of? -
Inside Star Trek issue 3: DeForest Kelley on television stress and McCoy’s secret pain
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 3, published September 1968.
Issue 3 delivered a good interview with DeForest Kelley, but otherwise it’s light on content, with no other articles.
The daughter we never met
Editor Ruth Berman caught Kelley during a break in shooting The Empath. The character had just been tortured, and the two walked to Kelley’s dressing room with “McCoy’s rags fluttering around him.”
From TrekCore Berman asked him to describe McCoy and, just coming off that emotional scene, the actor struggled a little. “I know what McCoy is in my mind [but] right now it seems kind of hazy to me…I guess because I just got through doing a scene down there.” He then added:
I picture him as a dedicated physician, who came aboard for some reason that hasn’t been explained quite clearly…perhaps from some deep hurt in his background.
Kelley’s idea that McCoy fled a personal tragedy had been kicking around behind the scenes for a while. This interview took place in the late summer of 1968. A memo from Dorothy Fontana, dated January 1967, pitched Gene Roddenberry on the idea:
Dear Gene:
I came up with the following premise after a conversation with DeForest Kelley on January 4…
Teaser: The U.S.S Enterprise stops over at a Star Base to pick up new medical personnel being transferred to duty aboard. As the group of doctors and nurses beams aboard, McCoy and Kirk greet them in the Transporter Room. One of the women, a lovely dark-haired girl of twenty, takes one look at McCoy and flings herself into his arms. Much to Captain Kirk’s surprise. Then McCoy turns to Kirk, grinning, and introduces Nurse Joanna McCoy…his daughter.
The heart of the story concerns Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Joanna. We will learn McCoy had been married a long time ago, but it turned sour and ended in divorce despite the birth of the child, Joanna. McCoy soon after the divorce entered the space service.
McCoy’s divorce never made it to screens in the ’60s, but the 2009 JJ Trek used the idea when McCoy explains to Kirk that he enrolled in Starfleet following a bitter breakup.
Fontana’s story outline had Joanna and Kirk developing a relationship — “In the course of the story, Kirk will find himself drawn to Joanna, and she is (naturally) attracted to him” — and McCoy getting overly protective of her, causing tension between the friends. Joanna, as the episode was to be called, was never produced and — somehow — the idea morphed into The Way to Eden, with Chekov’s old girlfriend Irina Galliulin replacing Joanna.
DeForest Kelley also told Berman that his favourite episodes to that point included The City on the Edge of Forever, Metamorphosis, Miri and Tomorrow is Yesterday.
Production stress
Kelley was also open about the taxing nature of television production:
It’s very tiring. It’s rewarding in many ways, but it’s an exhausting routine. Matter of fact, we’ll all kind of run-down.” He looked ruefully at his cigarette. “Probably smoke too much. I know that Bill is weary, and Leonard, and so am I. The pace kind of catches up with you, but then a week goes by, and you kind of get your second wind. I can’t help but believe this is a more difficult show to do than, let’s say, a western or a Dragnet or something of that nature. We’re vitally concerned, all three of us are, with this show, the scripts — even after we get the script we’re concerned. It may reflect sometimes as an antagonism, but it isn’t antagonism, it’s simply wanting it to be right, and as a result we sometimes have to have a few fights, you know, to get it that way.
From TrekCore Berman then suggests to Kelley one example of wanting to get it right, from The City on the Edge of Forever:
McCoy is coming out from under the influence of a drug but he’s still groggy. In the script, he falls asleep saying to a girl ‘Quite all right, I don’t believe in you either.’ But the way it came out was, ‘Quite all right, my dear, I don’t believe in you either.’ Which sort of captured his gentleness and gallantry.
That’s a subtle but important bit of characterization, and those small production details, told by the people on the set in the ’60s, make this newsletter so important.
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
Click here to read other articles in this series. -
Thank you, Doug Drexler, for trying to save the Gold Key comics
Doug Drexler tells a great story about the Gold Key Star Trek comics. The man who would go on to become a noted makeup artist, scenic artist, illustrator, and visual effects expert on TNG, Voyager, DS9, Enterprise and five Trek films was working at the Federation Trading Post in the mid-70s. The New York store was a mecca for Trekkies in the early days of fandom. It printed its own posters, made uniforms, and sold outfits to Saturday Night Live for its Star Trek spoof.
Drexler talked about Gold Key on The Inglorious Treksperts podcast:
The Gold Key guys came strutting in one day. They were only across the street from us, and they were coming in to be big shots. About a half hour before they came in, we were using them as an example of how wrong [Star Trek products] could go. So they came in and said, “We do the Gold Key comics!” and we burst out laughing. We couldn’t help it. We told them, as gently as we could, what was wrong with their comics.
Gold Key published 61 Star Trek comics between 1967 and 1979, although a few were reprints. They are highly prized now for their kitsch value but, as Drexler said, there was a lot wrong with the books. The plots were silly, the characters were nothing like what we saw on TV, and the details were always incorrect; flames squirted from the shuttle deck and the nacelles, the look of the bridge and the transporter room were just made up, Scotty was often drawn as a tall blond guy, and his name was misspelled as Slott on the cover of issue 55. It is said that the two artists who drew the early issues both lived in Italy and had never seen the show.
Back in the ‘70s, though, there was almost no Star Trek merchandise, so the comics were popular, and collecting comics is a lot of fun. I was actually sorry when I completed my collection.
I have always been interested in the story behind these books, so I was pleased when well-known comic writer Len Wein was scheduled to appear in Toronto for a convention in 2009. Wein wrote eight issues for Gold Key and I could finally ask someone about those days. I had him autograph The Legacy of Lazarus (#9) and The Enterprise Mutiny (#14).
Sadly, though, he didn’t have a lot to say about his time at Gold Key. Perhaps he didn’t enjoy those years; he went on to bigger things, including co-creating Swamp Thing at DC and reviving the X-Men franchise at Marvel. I walked away from his table not knowing any more than when I arrived.
Wein died in 2017 and, while Swamp Thing is definitely the height of his career, his Star Trek work wasn’t bad. Issue 9 is about a planet full of androids made in the images of Earth celebrities, and 14 is a good story about a Klingon plot to replace Kirk with a lookalike operative. A clever Spock foils the plot, but the end is marred slightly by a repeat of the scene in Whom Gods Destroy in which Spock is holding a phaser on two identical Kirks. The obvious solution is to stun them both but, as in the episode, Spock guesses which is real and shoots the other one.
A few years after Wein’s work, Drexler’s criticism caused the Gold Key guys to basically say “Oh yea, you think you can do better?” And yes, he did. Drexler wrote down some ideas and ended up with a story consultant credit on two issues.
This Tree Bears Bitter Fruit, #47, is an interesting story about energy beings who destroy matter for food. There is a mysterious old man who controls the beings, but his plot line is dropped following a convoluted fight between Kirk and the energy beings. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it doesn’t really have to. It’s fun. And the artwork and characterization are far more accurate than in the early days. There are also nice callbacks to the Organians and The Lights of Zetar, and a recreation of the salad scene from The Corbomite Maneuver. Those came from Drexler.
But even he could only do so much: Scotty is shown seated at the transporter console, a surprised Kirk exclaims “Great galaxies!” and the tricorders are huge and bright pink.
Issue 48, Murder on the Enterprise, is a fairly standard whodunit but it’s entertaining. Drexler salts the story liberally with references for fans. Kirk mentions his time as a lieutenant on the Farragut (Obsession), Spock says a scientist made his reputation studying the silicone-based life on Janus IV (The Devil in the Dark), one person is “hungry as a sehlat” (Journey to Babel and Yesteryear) and there is even a quick mention of the halo fish seen in the animated episode The Terratin Incident.
Although he only worked directly on two issues, Drexler’s involvement greatly improved what followed. Before him, issue 46 opens with the crew dreading the jump to warp drive, as traveling faster than light is a “wrenching, dizzying, blinding” experience that Scott describes as entering “the mouth of hell.” This is laughably inconsistent with the TV show.
After Drexler’s involvement, the comics looked and sounded more like Star Trek, with accurate artwork and less outlandish stories. Issue 49, for example, is a mostly thoughtful sequel to Metamorphosis which even includes a recap of the episode. Again, Drexler’s influence didn’t fix everything: for some reason, Zefram Cochrane is drawn as an older man with theatrically swept-back hair.
The Gold Key comics were never great Star Trek, but they got markedly better after Doug Drexler worked with the publishers. For that, Doug, Trek fans thank you.
-
The Horror at 37,000 Feet is all you need to know about early ’70s Shatner
The Encyclopedia Shatnerica has this to say about the 1973 made-for-TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet: “The hackneyed plot concerns a jumbo jet, and especially those passengers in first class, which is being haunted by ghosts because of a druid stone in the baggage hold.”
This cinematic gem also features flight attendants wearing ridiculous helmets, a dog you just know is doomed, and an impressive B-list cast that included one past and one future Star Trek star. It also illustrates what William Shatner went through after he left the bridge of the Enterprise.
I have this movie on an old VHS tape in a box somewhere, but luckily it is also available on YouTube in a good transfer.
Shatner plays an alcoholic ex-priest whose character is defined early on with the world-weary line, “I’ll tell you something: I’m bored with rules.” He is meant to give the movie some gravitas; a defrocked priest, after all, should have insight into the supernatural goings-on that soon terrorize the passengers. Unfortunately, his wisdom is delivered in lines like “The closer to heaven, the more discordant,” which doesn’t make much sense even in the story’s context.
Only a few years after guest-starring in Elaan of Troyius, France Nuyen boards the cursed airplane in a small-to-vanishing role. She plays a model who briefly serves as a love interest for one of the male leads; unfortunately, the subplot is dropped as soon as it appears and she is relegated to standing in the background of scenes.
Paul Winfield, Captain Clark Terrell in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, is almost unrecognizable playing a fussy British doctor. He too gets little to do.
The cast also includes Buddy Ebsen (The Beverly Hillbillies’ Jed Clampett) and Russell Johnson (the Professor from Gilligan’s Island).
It is not a good movie. The plot doesn’t make sense, the acting is stilted and it is only sporadically even a little scary. A few years before both Jaws and Alien created terror by keeping the monster hidden for most of the movie, Horror tries for the same effect but ultimately disappoints when no big bad ever bursts on to the screen.
But watch the movie anyway. It’s one of those so-bad-it’s-good films that are a lot of fun to watch. And it is indicative of the career struggles Shatner faced after Star Trek.
The Shatner of the ’70s
The decade between the end of TOS and the release of The Motion Picture in 1979 were largely unproductive years for Shatner; he lived for a while in the back of a truck camper, made movies like Horror and appeared in a lot of small plays. As he wrote in his autobiography Up Till Now, “After my divorce from Gloria (in 1969) I was just about broke…and I began looking for work. I had three kids and an ex-wife to support.”
So he took any gig that paid, and the result was a lot of mediocre work that would have been entirely forgotten had Shatner not become a cultural icon. His climb back to prominence began with the best movie of this period, The Kingdom of the Spiders, which hit theatres just two years before The Motion Picture, but even it would have faded into the shadows without the reflected light of Star Trek.
Shatner has often said that his success comes largely from his willingness to say yes when asked if he wants to do something. As he wrote in Shatner Rules:
I nearly always say “yes.” “Yes” means opportunity. “Yes” makes the dots in your life appear. And if you’re willing and open, you can connect these dots. You don’t know where these dots are going to lead, and if you don’t invest yourself fully, the dots won’t connect. The lines you make with those dots always lead to interesting places. “No” closes doors. “Yes” kicks them wide open… As long as you’re able to say “yes,” the opportunities keep coming, and with them, the adventures.
Those opportunities led Shatner through The Horror at 37,000 Feet and to a set crawling with 5,000 tarantulas and eventually to three Emmy Awards for Boston Legal, the Shatner Claus Christmas album and a thousand other projects. Catch one of those early dots with Horror on YouTube. -
33 stickers that take you back to Star Trek collecting in the ’70s
You have likely never seen this licensed Star Trek kids’ booklet. It was made in Canada and the only one I have ever seen in person is the one I own. I’ve added a PDF download link below so you can have your own copy.
The booklet was published in 1975 by Morris National Sales of Montreal, Quebec. It told an original story and came with numbered stickers to place in numbered spots. The images are from different episodes, plus there are a couple of illustrations.
Morris produced 33 stickers on sheets with three or four stickers each. The sheets were sold glued to a cover. Each cover was a puzzle piece; assembled, they formed the image of the Enterprise seen on page 4 of the book. Once you completed the puzzle, you could send the pieces off to Morris to receive “a full color poster of that scene.”
Complete the puzzle… 
…get this poster.
The book opens with overviews of the main crew and the Enterprise, and this section is surprisingly well written. The author even got Kirk’s serial number right, SC 937-0176 CEC, as seen in Court Martial. However, the entry on McCoy includes this weird note: “His personality quirks are famous among the crew who think him a bit odd.”
The Siege
The story, called The Siege, has a landing party beaming down to investigate the remnants of a city. The part that goes with sticker 6 says the group is Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov, but the image is actually a scene from Arena in which Chekov does not appear; the red shirt in the episode is Ensign O’Herlihy.
The story then takes a hard turn when Kirk begins to hallucinate that he is battling a “power-mad psychotic starship commander” (using photos of Kirk and Gary Mitchell from Where No Man Has Gone Before) and then a “grotesque reptilian creature,” the gorn from Arena.
McCoy tackles Kirk, and Spock instructs him to use his belt to tie the captain, which is a strange order until you realize it matched up with Kirk’s hallucination and allowed them to use a photo from The Cloud Minders.
Back aboard the Enterprise, Kirk is sedated in sickbay and McCoy and Spock determine the crew is under attack by aliens feeding on their thoughts or emotions or memories. Spock begins hallucinating that he’s back on Vulcan, but he recovers (somehow) and then Kirk escapes sickbay (somehow).
Here again we see some cleverness: for the story, Spock needs to chase down Kirk and hold a phaser on him. Where does he find the captain? In the shuttlebay, which allows them to use the publicity photo of Spock standing in front of the Galileo.
And what does Spock do with the phaser? He “fired a lethal disrupt beam at full charge, into Jim Kirk.” Like, the actual Kirk. The captain. Spock reasoned that the alien field influencing Kirk would absorb the phaser energy. We are all fortunate that he was correct.
But the story ends on a real down note. When Spock cut the shields (in order to disrupt the alien’s hold on the Enterprise crew — or something, it’s really not clear), “The enormous amount of energy built up to counteract the deflectors was then snapped back to its source in an awesome backlash,” causing an explosion that left the alien settlement “shattered and trembling.” In other words, Spock killed an unknown number of beings on the planet and no one comments or beams down to see if anyone survived. It’s a scene reminiscent of Kirk’s casual genocide in the novel Mission to Horatius, and again it takes place in a story meant for children.
’70s collectibles were different
Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of items like this, and yes, the story is entirely silly, but remember, many collectibles were created for kids, and it would have been a lot of fun to paste the stickers into the boxes, creating a picture book as you went.
And remember too that in 1975 the pictures themselves were collectibles. The first Fotonovel was still two years away, the episodes weren’t available on VHS until the ’80s, and dealers covered tables with 8x10s at conventions — because people wanted Star Trek photos.
Today we buy screen-accurate props and costumes and high-end models from Master Replicas and Eaglemoss; we expect a lot from our collectibles. In the ’70s, we were thrilled just to see an item with Star Trek on it. We were very forgiving.
One of the centre posters These books sometimes appear on eBay, and the sellers usually want a lot for them. If you decide to add one to your collection, know that they came in four editions, all the same but with different posters in the middle: Spock, Kirk, Kirk and the Gorn, and the Robot. I only own the Spock edition, and that’s okay with me. I like this item, but one is enough.
-
Inside Star Trek issue 2: two days to make Spock’s ears, 90 minutes to get Nimoy into them
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 2, published August 1968.
Cover by the amazing Greg Jein
The cover drawing of the Klingon D7 is by accomplished model maker Greg Jein. He drew it in 1968, and by 1977 he was hired to construct an updated variant of the D7 for Star Trek: Phase II. Two years after that, he created the V’ger interior models for Star Trek: The Motion Picture on a very tight schedule. He told Cinefex magazine: “We called people all over town. There were probably close to twenty or thirty of us working on it, on and off. At least four weekends we didn’t go home at all. When it finally came out, we were still two or three days late.” (Issue 2.)
Jein also worked on the two- and six-foot studio models of the Enterprise-D for Encounter at Farpoint and built other pieces for that episode, and contributed to other TNG episodes plus DS9, Voyager and many of the movies.
Jein is responsible for or contributed to 51 Star Trek models, but his first Trek product was this newsletter cover.
From Oz to Spock’s ears
Fred Phillips was already an accomplished make-up artist when he landed on the Enterprise. Asked by editor Ruth Berman about his career, he paused in a list of productions to ask “…what was that fantasy with Bert Lahr?” She replied “The Wizard of Oz?”
When working on Oz sort of slips your mind, you’ve done a lot of important work. He added “The Wizard of Oz is actually where I got the training I’ve been able to execute on Outer Limits and this show.”
Berman asked about creating the Vulcan and Romulan ears:
I have to take an impression of the actor’s ears. It takes between 20 and 30 hours to make a pair of ears. I would normally need two days to get the ears ready, from impression to finished appliance. After you have the molds done, you pour the rubber in — and the room temperature and the temperature of all the ingredients have to be inside a range of 65 to 71 degrees. Then it takes four hours cooking in the oven and three hours cooling. Usually what I do is put the molds in the oven when I get home from work around eight, and then I can take them out around midnight. You could take them out sooner but then the molds would crack.”
Phillips at work for Amok Time Berman asked if appliances are ever reused, and Phillips recounted a story I believe appears in print only here. “They had wanted a custom-built head for the aliens in the show we’re doing this week, The Empath — but there just wasn’t time. I was able to substitute with a head that came from the pilot to Outer Limits.” There was only one alien in The Outer Limits pilot The Galaxy Being, but there are two Vians in The Empath, so that detail is unclear.
Image from parlor of horror
Image from TrekCore Phillips said getting Leonard Nimoy ready for the cameras usually took 90 minutes. Some characters took much longer. He showed Berman his sketch of the Gorgan from And the Children Shall Lead: “Now that one took a long time. It was for Melvin Belli. It looks like a mask, but it actually isn’t because the face has to be able to move freely.”
Phillips’ Gorgan sketch 
The screen version (TrekCore) It’s an interesting story about a really poor episode, but at least lawyer Melvin Belli enjoyed his time on set. He told Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman in the book Captains’ Logs, “The most fun for me personally was my ‘melting’ death scene. Even though they had taken casts of my face much earlier, the makeup required for the scene still took the better part of the morning. They would shoot for a time, pause, then take me back to makeup to make me look more hideous.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue. -
Kirk and Spock were meant to bust out of your wall. I got my poster signed instead
When you got a Super Hero Wallbusters poster, you were supposed to cut out the figures, paste them on your wall, and then write something clever in the word balloons. When I got mine, I stored it in a poster tube, got Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner to sign it, and then paid a lot of money to get it framed.
I’ve been collecting for a long time, and it’s rare to find something I have never seen. Don’t want, already have or can’t afford — sure. But entirely new to me? Not often.
I was walking the dealer room at Toronto Trek in 2006. Nimoy and Shatner were scheduled for the Fan Expo convention that fall, so I was looking for something to get signed. I spotted this big poster (90 x 120 cm, 3 x 4 feet) from across that crowded room. I had never seen one before.
The dealer had found two in storage; he had forgotten about them. (See? Go through your old stuff; you never know what you’ll find.) He was asking $50 and surprised me by throwing in a Star Trek V juice carton, which is now one of the oddest items in my collection. The next day I dropped by his booth and he asked if I would have paid more for the poster. I said yes, so the person who got his last one paid $75. Sorry about that.
The poster is copyrighted 1977. The manufacturer, Western Graphics Corporation, was bought sometime after by Mead Corporation and then by Rose Art Industries and seems to be no longer. The company also produced Spider-Man, Evel Knievel and Wonder Woman Wallbusters, and that’s all I know about it or its products.
I wish I had a great signing story, but this was one of those cons when Shatner and Nimoy had a huge line so they just signed with their heads down. I had hoped the unusual item would get them to look up and inquire about it. No luck. I also got the American Cancer Society anti-smoking poster autographed at that con, with the same lack of personal contact. As I said, lots of people to get through.
But it is still one of my favourite pieces, because it’s a fun likeness, I have not seen another since, and it’s big and looks great on my wall. Also, it got me that weird juice-carton collectible.
Collecting Trek
A TOS collection 40 years in the making
Collecting Trek 